The return on investment expended in the prosecution of foxhunters in England is abysmally low, yet the “social mission to purify” countryfolk persists, according to Michael Henderson in The Telegraph.

The numbers are in. Of 110 people charged under the Hunting Act last year, fifty-six were found guilty. And most of those were poachers! According to the Countryside Alliance, only six of those fifty-six belonged to a registered hunt.

The cost of bringing these few foxhunters to “justice” was in the millions of pounds, much of it furnished by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in snooping on foxhunters and funding prosecutions.The RSPCA spent more than three hundred thousand pounds prosecuting the Heythrop Hunt alone in 2012. Originally “established with the noblest of aims but which has degenerated into an association of zealots,” the RSPCA has even provoked the ire and condemnation of judges of the court with their freewheeling use of donors’ funds.

Henderson reports that the RSPCA’s income from donations fell by seven million pounds last year. He writes, “There is valuable work for the RSPCA to do, but it doesn’t involve meddling in the lives of countrymen and women who pay their taxes on time and do their best by their neighbours.

“For farmers, and for an increasing number of city-dwellers as well, Johnny Fox is not quite the cuddly chap some of these people think he is. They have better ways to spend their money. It is time, begging Fagin’s pardon, for them to review the situation.”